12 (2007/Sony DVD)
Picture:
B Sound: B Extras: C- Film:
B-
Hollywood
has an uncanny habit of taking foreign films, gutting them of all emotion, and
reworking them as English-speaking films for American audiences. However, every now and again the opposite
occurs and a film that originated in the U.S. gets re-translated overseas, here
we have 12, a Russian interpretation
of Sidney Lumet’s brilliant 1957 film 12
Angry Men starring Henry Fonda, but unlike when Hollywood desecrates
classic foreign films, this film actually works well and works well as a
comparison to the original.
While it
does not have near the emotional prowess that Lumet’s film did, this
interpretation still serves well as Nikita Mikhalkov directs a group of 12
jurors who must decide the fate of a Checken teen who is being charged with
murdering his stepfather, of course all early indications seem to show that he
is guilty as charged, but like the original, there must be more to it than
that, the rest is similar and yet surprising to the original material and a
great reworking that fans of the original and new audiences will find
entertaining.
The film
does run a bit long though, nearly 3 hours in length, and feels like it could
get cut down a bit to work, but that is my only real gripe with the film. The presentation on DVD is a good one,
although we’d like to see a film like this arrive to Blu-ray eventually as
well. The 2.35 X 1 anamorphically enhanced
scope image looks fairly good, although it would seem that the chosen method
for shooting this film is with a softer and more washed out appearance, which
does not translate nearly as well to DVD as we’d hope, of course the
compression that DVD utilizes never helps this aspect, we know that Blu-ray
will correct much of these problems. The
sound is an adequate, yet lossy Dolby Digital 5.1 mix, which is suitable,
especially as it is dialogue-driven, most will be reading the yellow subtitles
anyway.
We’d hope
to see extras as well, maybe the Blu-ray can give us those as well, plus
increase the technical aspects in that transfer, since the film was an Academy
Award nominee, we expect more and Sony should back that up!
- Nate Goss
